Interview with Georg GreveLet's talk about hardware: The POWER of open.. How Open POWER is changing the game and why the Free Software Community should care.

Q: Could you briefly introduce yourself?

I’m Georg Greve, born a long time ago on a tiny island far, far away. Became a
self-taught software developer in the 1980s, started using GNU/Linux in 1992,
joined the GNU Project and became its speaker in 1998. Founded the Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE) in 2001 along with a group of like-minded
free software developers. Represented and promoted the agenda of software
freedom at the United Nations, the European Commission and with countries around
the world. Deeply involved in the software patent wars, the Microsoft
antitrust case, the OOXML/ODF battles. Since 2010 my mission is to restore and
protect our collective ability to collaborate in confidence. Collaboration and
communication is at the heart of our existence and ability to form societies.
That is why I co-founded Kolab Systems AG as a company to provide a general
set of technologies based on principles of security, privacy, robustness and
decentralisation. Everything about Kolab is free software / open source and
we’re working hard to build the fully free collaboration stack of the future.

Q: What will your talk be about, exactly? Why this topic?

I’ll be talking about the subject of OpenPOWER, how it came to be, why it is
important and what are the opportunities it offers for our community. This is a
topic that I became aware of last year and that has surprised me in a positive
way. Hardware is a difficult topic. The amount of investment required to handle
hardware at scale has put it off limits for most people.

So as a community, our approach to it has been mostly reactive, sometimes even
fatalistic. We know about many of the issues with Intel. Some people are
working hard to mitigate these, i.e. by trying to disable the management
engine, but it is ultimately a difficult road where open source will remain a
second class citizen in the foreseeable future. OpenPOWER has a fundamentally
different dynamic, but most people in our community do not even know it exists.

Q: What do you hope to accomplish by giving this talk? What do you expect?

The goal of the talk is to raise awareness and visibility of what is going on
around OpenPOWER, how we found our way into it, what we have discovered as a
member of the OpenPOWER Foundation, and what opportunities we see in this
ecosystem.

Q: How did you discover OpenPOWER?

We discovered OpenPOWER by chance, I am afraid to admit. IBM contacted us on
behalf of a large supermarket chain in a European country that was already
running Kolab, but had now decided to switch to OpenPOWER and wanted
to know whether they could run Kolab on POWER. So we worked together to
certify Kolab for Power8 and in the course of that work got insight into the
OpenPOWER ecosystem.

When challenging that ecosystem with some questions, it became apparent there
is a major opportunity here for the community that deals in software freedom
and questions of security and control. But (almost) no-one knows of it.

Q: Are you using OpenPOWER hardware in your data centre at Kolab Systems?

We only became aware of this last year, and hardware purchasing cycles are
generally longer than 6 months. But we’re currently putting together our next
round of evolution of our data centre, and expect OpenPOWER to feature
centrally in that.

Q: Are there some disadvantages or challenges when migrating to OpenPOWER hardware?

Not really. Power is supported by all the major distributions and handles
virtualization exceptionally well, better even than Intel. The only major
difference is in Big vs Little Endian architecture. But the coming versions now
also allow running Little Endian virtual machines on OpenPOWER, which is Big Endian.

Q: What’s the significance of the POWER8-based Talos Secure Workstation?

It is designed from the ground up to have no black boxes, and with security in
mind. So it allows you to have an exceptionally powerful workstation that is
more secure than virtually any other hardware platform you could find today.

That workstation carries enough power to simultaneously serve as your server
for small and some medium sized companies. So as a hardware platform, it is
exceptionally interesting and could be the first step toward also a high
performance, high security laptop in the future.

The crowdfunding campaign has failed, yes. But only for now, I would hope.
The idea of the workstation was a little older, and the people who were
willing to build it are certainly still around and still have something to say
about user controlled computing.

Their statement certainly betrays their disappointment (which I share) and is
somewhat centred around negatives and absolutes, but the key points made are
valid and the issues are not getting smaller. So there are lessons to be
learned here, and I believe as a community we need to pay attention
to this if we want to have software freedom not only on pen and paper.

Q: What are your expectations of OpenPOWER hardware in the near future?

Looking at what I saw at the OpenPOWER Summit Europe in Barcelona last year, I
am sure we will see some surprising and disruptive innovations coming out of
this field. So instead of 10-20% improvements we will see orders of magnitude
up to 100x, 200x in certain fields, especially when looking at cloud and
analytical fields.

Q: Have you enjoyed previous FOSDEM editions?

You could say that. I’ve been at every single FOSDEM there ever was. Did not
miss a single one so far. Not sure whether I am last man standing by now. ;)